The rise of crimeware

For a few hours late last week, visitors to the Bank of India Web site had their browsers covertly redirected to a site hosting malicious exploits. Increasingly, criminals, often without any technical experience, are defacing popular Web sites with code that allows them to direct your browser to download content without you even knowing. Finjan, a security company that's been on the cutting edge of detecting Web 2.0 malware, identifies 10 toolkits for sale on the Internet, up from earlier this year.

If you are an online criminal these days, says Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CTO of Finjan, "you are buying a software package from hackers. Without any computer science skill or any security background, you can install this package on any Web server and start to infect people with malicious code." As long as the thieves are making money, there appears to be no sign of stopping this current rise in crimeware. The rise of crimeware - CNET reviews